Washington’s secretary of state wants your game fighting the Cold War

A politician with combat deployments on his résumé spent PAX West telling game developers their work is a geopolitical instrument — the friendly kind, he insists.

Game developers at PAX West and Seattle's SLICE expo got an unusual booth visitor this month: Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, working the floor with a pitch that games aren't just an export industry — they're an instrument of American "soft power", and the people making them are, whether they signed up or not, on the field. He wasn't subtle about the stakes as he sees them:

"Right now we are in global competition. It is another Cold War."

Coming from most state officials, this would be LinkedIn-grade bluster. Hobbs is a former Army officer and a current lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard who served in Kuwait and Iraq, and his framing was explicitly that of a man who'd rather compete through culture than through his kids' deployments: games that reach hearts and minds are wars that don't happen.

The pitch, and where it comes from

Soft power isn't Hobbs's coinage — scholar Joseph Nye popularized it in a 1990 Foreign Policy essay, describing the kind of influence where

"one country gets other countries to want what it wants"

instead of ordering them at gunpoint. Hobbs's exhibit A was charmingly full-circle: a member of the visiting Games From Poland delegation told him about growing up under Soviet occupation, absorbing forbidden American culture through Voice of America broadcasts. Today Poland exports The Witcher, CD Projekt Red's global juggernaut built on Polish history and Andrzej Sapkowski's novels — the former audience of American soft power now running its own program, extremely successfully.

Read more: How Much Money Did Sapkowski Allegedly Get from Netflix for The Witcher?

The fine print nobody at the booth mentioned

Before anyone starts drafting their game's National Interest Statement, the counterarguments deserve their booth too:

• Some scholars file cultural soft power under cultural imperialism — a framing that lands differently if your country is usually on the receiving end of the projection.
• The concept has sharp edges elsewhere: analysts describe Saudi Arabia's massive game-industry investments as a soft power campaign, which is a less cozy data point than Polish RPGs.
• Washington, D.C. is currently playing the opposite game. As sociologist Katherine Cross pointed out on the PAX show floor, the same administration Hobbs jabbed at from the stage has slashed funding for Voice of America itself and dismantled USAID — divesting from the very machinery Hobbs is asking developers to embody.

Hobbs's own state, at least, is putting money adjacent to mouth: his office has been pushing programs to grow Washington's local game industry. His closing argument to developers was that creativity is the one arena where democracies hold home-field advantage over authoritarian rivals — and that, for the moment, it's the United States choosing to retreat from it.

Earlier we wrote: From capes to consoles: Hollywood ’s next franchise fixation is video games, says The Batman 2 co-writer